Can this book really teach people how not to be racist?
As a white, middle-aged man Robert McCrum concedes that there is a lot to learn about DEI, racism and unconscious bias. It’s just a pity that a Gladwellian tome that promises to unlock the science of racism doesn’t teach us the lesson he hoped..
Twenty-five years ago, not long before 9/11, a young Canadian journalist of English and Jamaican origin named Malcolm Gladwell published a short book with a provocative subtitle “how little things can make a big difference”. He called it The Tipping Point; his American publisher paid $1m for the rights; after a disastrous start, it rapidly acquired the status of myth. To a world fighting a “war on terror”, and consumed with ephemeral dread, Gladwell’s “little things” (Hush Puppies, broken windows, and the midnight ride of Paul Revere) became a new and entertaining way to look at social issues. Gladwell’s message (how just a few people can affect positive change) was at once provocative and soothing.
From The Tipping Point to Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking to Outliers: The Story of Success, which popularised the theory of “10,000 hours practice”, Gladwell became a genre-master illuminated in the flattering light of international imitation by numerous wannabe bestseller writers (often journalists), most of whom possessed neither his witty intelligence nor his effortless storytelling.
The Tipping Point became a millennial phenomenon that shaped a generation. Don’t take my word for it. Gladwell’s publishers have just released Revenge of the Tipping Point, a nonchalant audit of second thoughts by the writer who became, Bill Clinton said, “part of the zeitgeist”.
By chance, in this same season, we find The Science of Racism by Keon West, published with a throwaway Gladwellian subtitle (“Everything you need to know but probably don’t – yet”). West, who quips that “he has always been black”, is a social psychologist with some impressive qualifications, who has drunk deep at the well of The Tipping Point, and makes an early pitch for a similar readership.
“In this groundbreaking study,” declares the jacket blurb, “The Science of Racism … cuts through the divisive anecdotes and rhetoric with decades’ worth of clear, factual, rigorous and quantitative science to reveal truths about racism that are moving and tragic, but also (somehow) funny and entertaining.”
There’s a good reason for this edgy having-it-both-ways overture. West cheerfully concedes the unsurprising truth that racism is a highly contentious topic on which – almost every survey shows – our society is hopelessly divided.
From the first page, West’s literary persona is assertive, challenging, and takes no prisoners. He despatches the critical race theory (every white person is racist) with glee, while simultaneously scorning those, like Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, for whom CRT is an ideology that interprets whiteness as merely an oppression and blackness as only victimhood.
West’s larger contention seems to be that, by describing his chosen subject as “a science” (debatable) and his method as “research-based” (indisputable), he’s allowed to treat racism as a focus for provocative, contrarian zingers, and to find it “funny and entertaining”. To this reader, that’s a bad misstep, and one that steers this well-intentioned volume into some treacherous swamps.
Next to our democracy, and now more than ever, gender and race are matters of life and death. In that triptych of dread (politics, sex, and colour), race, as West will know, is the unquiet monster that continues to disturb our peace. This would still be true, whatever the history. Moreover, once we braid “race” with “slavery”, “oppression” and “genocide”, these are deep and horrendous waters. To navigate this area of darkness, we need empathy as much as science.
For instance, in contemporary experience, Black Lives Matter has been a profound global protest, an expression of solidarity with African Americans and Black society worldwide that demonstrates how deep and raw the wounds of racism are. Why then, is George Floyd cited just once in the index (p 215)?
In his eagerness to introduce us to the “science” of his research, West seems reluctant to explore even the most simple backstory to this harrowing subject. For instance, in one of West’s principal book markets – the USA – “race” is still inextricably associated with that historical crime in which both British and American society are deeply implicated. The founding father Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner who reportedly had a relationship with his slave Sarah Hemings, who most historians now agree bore him six children. In his last years, Jefferson became tormented by the threat of slavery to the American Revolution. It haunted him, he told a friend, “like a fire bell in the night”.
After the shocking death of George Floyd in 2020, Jefferson’s fire bell began to ring more urgently than ever. West will have heard it – he cites many other examples of contemporary racism – but his attachment to “science” appears to not have room for the racist detail of the Floyd tragedy, perhaps because “science” was unable to dice and slice it for ready consumption.
In many other areas, West makes the case for considering race through the lens of science. There’s nothing glib about this pitch; he dismisses the “snake-oil salesmen” whose “scientific claims” are “worthless”. On my reading, however, he doesn’t go far or deep enough; worse, his dedication to “factual, rigorous, and quantitative science” has an almost inevitable upshot: the breakdown of his scientific method. A chapter on the “complexity” of his subject is anchored in data, and telling anecdotes, but having declared reverse racism a “real, serious, and widespread problem”, West dives down a real-world rabbit hole to declare that society needs “to create a world in which we’re all, regardless of race, treated equally.”
Shortly after this, he concludes a fierce and persuasive attack on “colour blindness” with a telling admission: “It is silly to believe, of a problem as large and as powerful as racism, that if we ignore it, it will just go away.” Short on empathy, armoured with data, and focused on a popular audience, The Science of Racism often misses the wood for the trees. The chapter on diversity initiatives (DEI), which West wrote about in this publication, identifies many “myths” and some uncomfortable truths, but it remains too “scientific” to address the savage reality of Republican anti-DEI rhetoric that is currently underway.
In the end, West hardly leaves his comfort zone – decades of academic research – to address what, to this middle-aged and privileged, white, male reader must be the nub, the simple historical definition of racism: “A condition in which individuals are treated worse, excluded, harassed, bullied or degraded as a result of race and/or ethnicity, with sometimes fatal consequences.”
Where do we go from here? In many ways, West has done us all a favour by setting out, with argumentative clarity, the areas of “racism” that are no longer deserving of anguished white liberal scrutiny. Another new starting point might be to treat this subject as a profound historical curse of immense societal and global consequence, but not a forum for donnish mind games.
In Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell confesses to a youthful excess of certainty. He disowns his younger self, who was, he concedes, too cocksure and assertive. What he celebrates now is doubt, uncertainty, and the subtle nuances of ordinary existence. Perhaps West should be encouraged to borrow another leaf from Gladwell, and return to this subject of the most profound significance, which he knows intimately well, with compassion, modesty, and introspection.
The Science of Racism by Keon West is published by Picador (£20)
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